this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Bots subscribing to site--even with subscription URL is blocked in htaccess (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm using a self-hosted installation of PHPList to manage a newsletter.

Subscribers can be added via a POST to this URL:

https://www.[WEBSITE]/lists/?p=subscribe

It's presently overrun by bots.

I added this to .htaccess to block this URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=subscribe$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^ - [F]

Now, if you visit the subscription page above it will give a 403 error.

But, you can still add subscribers by using a POST to this URL.

How can I actually block folks from using this URL to subscribe?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Do you have any access logs on the server? Or can you enable them? Examine your logs and see what the bots are accessing, then block that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I know, I know 'BuT It's NOt seLFhOStEd!' but I just let the pros deal with bots and front that kind of stuff with Cloudflare.

If you've privacy concerns you can always have that one thing on a specific subdomain and only enable Cloudflare on that, whilst keeping the rest of your subdomains unproxied.

Alternatively can't you add a capture (again, giving up a bit of privacy).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is one of the cases where there’s a real practical advantage to having a reverse proxy in front of your site/software. The proxy could be configured very easily to drop any access to that specific URL .